6 Takeaways from Money20/20 USA 2018

Since it was founded six years ago, Money20/20 USA has been the premier annual conference to help drive business growth by connecting individuals and organizations of various sizes across industries. This year from October 21 to 24, more than 11,000 C-level executives, expert speakers, innovators and disruptors representing every key sector and organization in the payment and financial services ecosystem gathered at the Venetian in Las Vegas to do just that.

With more than 500 speakers and a wide array of networking events, those in attendance could choose from an agenda covering payments and platforms, banking and personal finance, next-generation commerce and retail, AI and deep learning, cybersecurity and fraud, alternative lending and credit, digital marketing and CX, globalization, digital identity and biometrics and more.

For the last several years, Mastercard has been honored to serve as a 5 Star Sponsor and exhibitor for this unique event, and we’re pleased to share some of this year’s insights from the presentations of six high-profile speakers.

In their own words, here is what industry leaders have to say about the challenges and opportunities facing the world of payments.

On Leadership and Diversity

“The research is absolutely clear. Diverse leadership teams lead to higher returns, lower risk and greater innovation. The power of diversity is so great that diverse teams outperform higher IQ teams, and we all know this intuitively. If you are the CEO and you hire one person who’s exactly like you, you’ve done nothing.”

Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest

On Artifical Intelligence

“Artificial intelligence allows us to get a better perspective on customers. We’ll be able to lend more to people who were invisible before because we’ll have other data that perhaps tells us even better stories about that customer [and] how they’re going to perform in the long-term … It’s very important to be transparent about what we’re using in that model because we really have to be able to articulate to a customer why they may not get approved and we have to be very careful as we build these models out.”

Margaret Keane, President and Chief Executive Officer of Synchrony

On the Future of Digital Payments

“Across the ecosystem, we have to innovate in ways big and small to make this whole experience much simpler, much faster and more secure for our users, our merchants and the overall ecosystem … People need to know they’re in control in order for them to fully embrace digital payments. Once we do this and help both users and merchants, we will see a dramatic adoption in terms of digital payments.”

Caesar Sengupta, GM Payments & VP Next Billion Users, Google

On Working Together in the Digital Economy

“There’s a huge opportunity to help tens of millions of small businesses get in the game on digital commerce. While it feels like there’s a booming industry, there are so many people who aren’t yet a part of it … We as an industry need to work together to get more businesses in the digital economy. Not only do we need to partner in order to do those things, but the very best customer experience is oftentimes the composite of many people working together.”

Bill Ready, Chief Operating Officer, PayPal

Advice to Upcoming Entrepreneurs

“If you’re going to have a successful business, you must be a wonderful motivator of people, you must be looking for the best in your people, and you must avoid criticizing your people, and lavish a lot of praise on your people … There’s no point in existing if you’re not going to be the consumer’s friend. If your products are palpably better [than your competitors’], then your staff will be better committed, very happy to come into work the next day, because they know they’re offering a great service.”

Sir Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Group

Technology and Urban Challenges

“[Our challenge] revolves largely around how we can use data, technology and products to help cities do a better job of meeting the needs of their constituents — both so they can deliver services more efficiently and compete more effectively on a national or a global scale for investment. We can use payments data, transactions data to evaluate down to the level of a city block what’s the impact on economic activity. What does that do to stimulate investment in a neighborhood? These are the kinds of instances where we can bring payments capability to bear and combine it with identification programs that cities are deploying to have under-served members of the community gain access to city services. If you combine that with payment functionality that can be used to receive or make payments, you’re then extending the value of electronic payments to a whole new class of constituents.”

Craig Vosburg, President, North America, Mastercard

Selected video and image highlights from the Money20/20 USA event can be seen here.